Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Human Interest Stories



The local paper said that someone had reported "a naked man ironing on his front porch". Just how skewed can a story get when it goes through the police records to the local newspaper? My friend, I'll call him Joe, told me that at first he didn't even recognize himself, but suddenly he remembered the moment. It's summer here in the Chiricuahua Desert and it gets hot. Joe was in his Bermuda shorts, out on his porch, spreading a beach towel over the railing. From someone's prespective, possibly through binoculars, it might have looked as if he had no clothes on and the action of smoothing the towel out on the railing might have looked as if he were ironing. My question is: Who would call the police about this in any case?




This is not the first time I've know the people behind the Human Interest story who could barely recognize themselves, or the story that was really happening. My pregnant friend in the Telephone Company in Santa Ana, California back in 1961 had a fast first delivery. She was unable to get out of their car because labor was so advanced, so the hospital staff came out to her and got her inside to safely have her baby. BUT, the newspaper story said she'd had the baby in the parking lot, and the reason she'd had it there was that she was reading an Alfred Hitchcock story and couldn't put it down.